• U.S.

Science: Nicotine Addict

2 minute read
TIME

Though he would seldom walk a mile for a cigaret, T. Harper Goodspeed is so addicted to nicotine that he traveled 12,000 miles to risk his neck traipsing about the Andes to gather tobacco plants. As heroic as his efforts were some of his finds —tobacco plants 40 feet high.

Goodspeed’s addiction is chiefly botanical: he was hunting for new species of tobacco and other plants for the practical U.S. Department of Agriculture and for his own purer research at the University of California. He tells his adventures in a new book, Plant Hunters in the Andes (Farrar & Rinehart; $5). Like all scientists who have pillaged foreign flora for the profit of U.S. agriculture, Goodspeed and his staff had no easy time. They slept in huts tumbling with guinea pigs, which Peruvians keep as pets. They rode along precipices on dynamite trucks. They broke the ice in hog troughs to wash their morning faces.

Peruvians would often snicker and guffaw as they watched Goodspeed scramble after odd plants. They thought he was gathering aphrodisiacs. But what really interested the botanist was the fact that many of the earth’s 60 species of Nicotiana grow among the Andes. There, scientists believe, the Nicotiana tabacum now commonly smoked developed long ago through natural hybridization. Federal tobaccomen think that wild, tough plants from their native mountains can perhaps be crossed with the highly bred, less vigorous tobacco strains now cultivated in the U.S., to increase their resistance to fungi, bacteria, viruses, insects which yearly cost growers millions of dollars.

Smoker as well as botanist, Goodspeed hopes that his plant exploration may consummate the sublime vision of the late U.S. Vice President Thomas Riley Marshall: a good 5¢ cigar.

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